Whenever he finishes a record, musician Royal Wood is typically left with a handful of songs. What isn’t typical is him doing something with them.

That, however, was the case with with the Canadian singer-songwriter’s newest release, the five-track EP Love Will Linger. The record is comprised of songs that didn’t make the final cut of his spring release, Ever After the Farewell, an album about love and loss.

“I’ve always had songs left over after a record, but these ones are all such standalone statements to me, important to me, and I just wanted to put them out in the world,” Wood, who performs at the Grand Theatre on Thursday, explained over the phone.

“And now there are no rules, there’s no record store, there’s no real record sales. You have streaming and we have our live shows,” he said. “Frankly, I love streaming, I love my shows, I love my fans, but that also means I get to just put out music. They all work together, and a little part of me thinks [the EP’s] better than how my record turned out.”

It’s not until after a recording has been released, when the “dust has settled,” that he is able to put it in perspective.

“I can definitely look back on my career and have the jewels in the crown, and then I can point at some and say, ‘I used my head too much, I tried too much, I listened too much to other people.’ I think we always know as artists where our peaks and valleys are, and I feel like this EP is a peak.”

It also reminds Wood — born John Royal Wood Nicholson — of the hands-on approach he used to make records in the early days. He feels he strayed from that process on what was his most successful record, 2012’s We Were Born to Glory, which was nominated for a Juno award for alternative album, among others.

“I feel like it just got watered down to me,” reflected Wood, who was asked to record demo after demo for each of that record’s songs.

“What I love about these last couple of records, we were so spontaneous. I would be writing in the morning, and recording and then sing the vocals [in the afternoon], and by night I’d be mixing the song. That’s how I want to make music.”

The songs on Love Will Linger pick up where he left off with Farewell, which featured songs about Wood falling in love and getting married while, at the same time, dealing with the death of his father, who struggled with Alzheimer’s disease for a couple of years before lung disease took his life. The track “Photograph,” for one, is specifically about his father.

“There’s definitely a paradigm shift when you lose a parent,” Wood reflected. “You think you’re ready on one hand, and, on the other hand, you think it’s never going to happen, they’re just going to be around forever.

“So it definitely brings a sense of meaning and mortality to what I’m doing, and I feel like the fire is burning even stronger now to make even more music, more art, because I love it. My dad was one of my biggest fans, and he’s why I got into music in the first place. He saw a natural gift in a four-year-old kid, and my mom just made sure there were instruments around.”

His family, like others, ignored the symptoms of Alzheimer’s his father was displaying, so he has been an advocate for the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health since his father was formally diagnosed.

“If you have a headache, you tell everybody. If your leg hurts, you tell everybody,” Wood said. “But if you forgot something that day, or things didn’t quite make sense, you don’t.”

The death of his father, whom he described as a larger-than-life storyteller, impacts everything he does, particularly as an artist, he said.

“I was actually speaking to a friend about this the other day, and they said that when a parent dies, something inside you ripens,” Wood suggested.

“I agree with that idea. I now feel more centred, and more sure of what I’m supposed to do.”